In the polarised environment that we now inhabit, there are few public agreements. One of these rare instances is an agreement that social media is broken. For many commentators, this is an area that needs urgent government intervention. But the form and shape of this intervention becomes again an issue of adversarial contest and controversy. This issue is fundamental to how today’s information ecology operates as large Silicon Valley platforms have become gatekeepers of social behaviours and the tremendous power they hold is anti-democratic.